Apple Music Now Plays With Alexa On Amazon Echo Speakers

Amazon announced in late November that its Echo smart speakers will soon support Apple Music with the integrated Alexa virtual assistant. Today, about two weeks after the initial revelation, the integration finally went live.

The deployment in the USA began with the Alexa app on Android and iOS. You can connect your Apple Music account to your Echo speakers from there. Once you have done this, you can listen to music by using Apple’s voice control on your Echo speaker.

You can set Apple Music to the default source of the Alexa music library and the default source of the music station. This allows you to request music without telling Alexa which service you should use. Apple Music on Alexa, including playlist, has access to your personal music library. You can ask the assistant to play more songs such as the current track that switches to your custom station. It is also possible to set alarms to music.

Some features are missing in comparison with what you would get with an Apple HomePod. Adding a song to the library with Alexa on an Apple Music Station is not possible (at least not yet) and you can not manually play music added to Apple Music from your collection.

Alexa can control playback, tell you stuff about what’s playing, and you can listen to music through the Alexa app’s speaker groups (if you have multiple echoes). I limit apple Music support to Echo speakers, so you ca n’t use it on third – party speakers who support Amazon’s assistant with Alexa.